Cathedral of sound

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Portugals new concert hall looks spectacular, but can you hear the music? Mark Irving asks what architecture can do for performance

Resembling a massive meteorite come to Earth, the Casa da Musica in Oporto is an astonishing building. The concert hall complex, designed by Rem Koolhaas, is likely to be declared a national monument very soon. However, the true test of a concert hall lies not in what the politicians or architecture critics say but in how those who perform and listen to music respond to it.

The morning after hearing the pianist Alfred Brendel play Mozart and Schumann there, I asked him how relevant architecture is to his performance. “Space means a lot to me. It’s all in the ability